Thanatopsis

One literary movement that helped inspire “Thanatopsis” is Romanticism, which affected literature, painting, music, and other arts during the late 18th to mid-19th centuries. Some characteristics of Romanticism include its profound appreciation of nature’s beauty, its examination of humanity, and its search for transcendent or sublime experiences that fill the observer with awe.

“Thanatopsis” embodies several elements of Romanticism. The poem celebrates nature as a repository of wisdom—it is there to cater to human emotions by reacting appropriately to times of happiness and sadness, decorate their world before and after death, to teach them the right way to view mortality, and to become the great tomb for humankind. The poem’s repeated attempts to quantify and describe the uncountable number of dead that the earth is home to is a way to evoke the sublime—in this case, the poet wants his reader to be awed by the sublimity of seeming infinity.

At the same time, Bryant is also drawing on another, more loosely organized literary movement: an offshoot of Romantics nicknamed the Graveyard Poets. Writers in this grouping largely focused on death and its physical manifestations, dwelling on the idea of human life as transitory and on the inevitability of death. “Thanatopsis” fits neatly into this category because of its examination of humans through the lens of death. The poem lingers over the image of the dying giving their bodies over to the earth; it attempts to console those who are frightened of death with the knowledge that they will join all those who came before them and that in death, all people will be equal in status. The poem insists that because death is inescapable, the best way to views this ultimate fate is with calm resignation and acceptance.